Amazing Stories Magazine: So much of modern science fiction speculates on dystopian futures, but many of your works lead the reader towards utopian possibilities. What inspires and drives this positive outlook you portray in so many of your novels?

Kim Stanley Robinson: I think it’s interesting. Dystopias are all basically the same, and easy: oppression, resistance, conflict, blah blah. Like car crashes in thriller movies. But utopian novels are interesting (I know this is backwards to the common wisdom) because they force us to think about what we are, what we could become, and if we were to make a decent civilization, what would endanger it, or keep it from spreading, etc. One point I’ve been making all along is that even in a utopian situation, there will still be death and lost love, so there will be no shortage of tragedy in utopia. It will just be the necessary or unavoidable tragedies; which perhaps makes them even worse, or more tragic. They won’t be just brutal stupidities, in other words, but reality itself. This is what literature should explore.

Also, thinking of utopia, I’ve always felt this: since we could do it, we should. And that will take some planning, some vision.

(...)

Amazing Stories Magazine: Within the science fiction community, the bond between fans and authors approaches symbiosis. How do you view this relationship, and how has fandom changed since you first fell in love with science fiction?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Again I came to all this late, as I walked into my first sf convention when I was 26, and at first didn’t understand what I was seeing. Eventually I learned that this was a community like a small town, cast across space and time as in some wild sf scenario, that reconvenes (partially) at weekends in hotels scattered everywhere. It’s a very intense intellectual community, very expert at thinking about the future, in ways that most of our culture is not—although it is true that everyone thinks about the future to one extent or another. But fandom makes it their hobby and so is expert at it. This can lead to the myopia of expertise, but generally is a very good thing. I’m proud to be part of the community, which is my intellectual home and where I met many of my best friends.

Fandom has gotten bigger but more diffuse, with interests in media and gaming and things other than literature per se, but stories stay at the heart of it, so there is common core interest. For the literary side, maybe it’s true that fandom has gotten older. I mean we do all get older, but a community aging as a totality, that’s different. But it’s hard to say, also.